No abstract

If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation.Abstract As we approach the twenty-first century, manufacturing success and survival are becoming more and more difficult to ensure. This fact is rooted in the emergence of a new business era that embraces``change'' as one of its major characteristics. The emphasis is now on adaptability to changes in the business environment and on addressing market and customer needs proactively. The emerging paradigm is agile manufacturing. Understanding and responding to changes, and taking advantage of changes through strategic utilisation of managerial and manufacturing methods and tools, are some of the pivotal concepts of agile manufacturing. This paper discusses these concepts and presents a methodology to assist manufacturing companies to achieve agility. Industrial questionnaire surveys and case studies are carried out to support and validate the methodology. Results and conclusions derived from the surveys and case studies in support of the methodology are reported.

An evolutionary transformation of business environment, with change as a main characteristic, is taking place. Manufacturing companies, even those operating in relatively stable conditions with good market positions, are facing rapid and often unanticipated changes in their business environment. Agile manufacturing is proposed in response to the circumstances as a solution and is perceived as a vital characteristic that manufacturing companies need to have in order to maintain their competitive advantages in the new order of world business. Each company will respond in a specific and different way to the changing circumstances by deploying its own agile characteristics. Agility in manufacturing may be achieved through the implementation and integration of appropriate practices which provide the required abilities for a company to respond properly to changes. Based on this concept, a methodology for achieving agility in manufacturing organisations is developed. The methodology is applied in two manufacturing companies and data collected from the applications are used to validate the methodology. This paper provides a brief summary of the methodology and details its implementation and validation in the two case study companies. Practices are proposed to support the achievement of agility in the two organisations.

The recent marketing literature identifies market orientation and marketing capabilities as key concepts that firms should use to achieve their competitive advantages. Previous research also confirms cross effects of these dimensions in firms' performance. The present study extends the literature on this subject by introducing absorptive capacity (AC) as a moderator of the relationship among market orientation, the interaction of market orientation and marketing capability, and firms' new product performance. This study empirically examines the research model using survey data from 188 manufacturing firms in Sweden. The findings confirm previous studies that claim a positive relationship among market orientation, marketing capability, and new product performance. More importantly, the results indicate that AC positively moderates the relationship between market orientation and firms' new product performance. Furthermore, the findings suggest that experts should consider AC as a competitive factor in line with the complimentary effect of market orientation and marketing capability. This consideration would contribute to explain better firm-related performance, such as new product performance.

No abstract